Re: Future of X packages in Debian

[Dominique Dumont <domi.dumont@free.fr>]

Keith Packard <keithp@keithp.com> writes:

> So, the big question is how to get everyone back into a single tree.  
> Ideally, Egbert would let us just ditch the imake build system and move 
> X.Org to autotools in one big jump; we have almost all of the build 
> infrastructure ready and waiting in my 'research' trees.  

In case of a "big jump", is autotools the only alternative to imake ?

There are other build system like scons or cons that could be used to
build X. 

At one point you mentionned the shortcomings of autotools, it might be
worth to check if cons or scons are more apt to build X than autotools.

> Alternatively, we would slowly modify the X.Org tree imake build
> infrastructure so that we could lay a modular autotools build system
> alongside and build either way. 

At work (HP) we moved rather slowly from a homebrewed system based on
make to a build system based on cons.

Now we use cons to build a software (~ 1 million lines of C,
Objective-C, C++) for Linux IA32 Linux IA64, HPUX for PA-RISC and
IA-64. So cons is able to handle huge softwares.

Hope this might help.

Cheers